Confronting Computers: Debates about Computers at the Public Archives of Canada during the 1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 1960s, staff members of the Public Archives of Canada began to encounter two aspects of computerization that are of continued relevance today: automation as a tool of information retrieval, and the preservation of computer records. This paper explores the initial experiences and perceptions of computer use at the Public Archives through the lens of the institution’s first automated finding aid project, and from the perspective of early discussions about electronic records management. Archivists’ ideas and responses to computers during the 1960s included a mix of excitement and scepticism. The discourse of this original decade of computer use serves to remind us of the foundational intellectual debates pertaining to technological change and archives. RÉSUMÉAu cours des années 1960, le personnel des Archives publiques du Canada a commencé à faire face à deux aspects de l’informatisation qui sont toujours aussi pertinents aujourd’hui : l’automatisation comme outil de repérage d’information et la préservation des documents informatisés. Ce texte examine les expériences et perceptions initiales de l’usage des ordinateurs aux Archives publiques telles que les révèlent le premier projet d’instrument de recherche automatisé et les discussions originelles au sujet de la gestion des documents électroniques. Les idées et réactions des archivistes par rapport aux ordinateurs durant les années 1960 comprenaient un mélange d’enthousiasme et de scepticisme. Le discours de cette première décennie d’usage des ordinateurs sert à nous rappeler les débats intellectuels fondamentaux au sujet des changements technologiques et des archives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.073 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.034 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".